I noticed how much alike these two photos of a woman are – but I was looking just at the small gap between her front teeth which seems to be identical – still one is from a photo in supposedly 2001 and one is from sometime later because she went missing on October 1, 2011 in the same area.

**
Woman with disabilities still missing from her West Side home
Published: Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 10:43 AM Updated: Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 12:54 PM
christina.jpgFamily photoChristina Kleckner

CLEVELAND, Ohio — A 24-year-old woman who has mental retardation and bipolar disorder remains missing from her West 48th Street home.

Police asked again today for help in their search for Christina Kleckner.

Her parents reported her missing Sunday, Oct. 2, after last seeing her at 8 p.m. the day before, when they argued about her going trick-or-treating. Her mother told Kleckner that she is an adult and cannot go, according to the police report.

Kleckner became angry and knocked things down before going to her bedroom. In the morning, her father discovered she was not in her room. Her black vinyl jacket was gone.

“He is concerned that his daughter may not be taking her medications,” Sgt. Sammy Morris said.

Kleckner frequented the areas of West 73rd Street and Lorain Avenue and Pearl Road and Archwood Avenue, Morris said.

She has brown hair, blue eyes and a scar from a dog bite on her left ankle. She has used the names Christine Preston and Tina, Tink and Crystal Kleckner.

“Numerous checks with neighbors, as well as area hospitals and shelters have failed to turn up any signs of Ms. Kleckner,” Morris said.

Anyway, the 24 year old that was listed as missing on October 1, 2011 would have been 14 in 2001 and because drugs she was being given all those years in between cause teeth to be lost – it is possible that the two women may be the same. The front teeth are the same with exact same gap – and the photo of Ariel and this girl may or may not be from 2001 regardless.

The other thing I noted about the photo of him with this girl is that by enlarging the photo a little, it is clearly obvious that his hands have signs of beating the hell out of something or someone – she has such heavy makeup around her eyes in a light blue or white that even this woman may be hiding bruises. After I had noticed the red bruises on his hands and around his knuckles, it wasn’t that hard to see them in the photo without even enlarging it. And obviously his friends, neighbors, family members, employer and anyone else like law enforcement who ever approached him would have had to have seen that in person but ignored it.

The map I’ve been making about the disappearances, murders and other information about the area –

I really wanted it to be a collaborative map but to have people add advertisements to every listing on it is not going to help. By the way, there was a subscription service map of crimes, including sexual assaults in Cleveland that was culled from every police department which showed absolutely none in this little triangle of Cleveland / West Cleveland which seems extremely odd.

It is found here – look at the triangle of West Cleveland where the girls were taken and then later found deep in its corner – no crime there according to this map from police records –

The entire area where I’ve found all of these showed nothing on their maps. It is impossible – but many of the things I found from news reports and other sources, as well as Department of Justice files. I actually made another map but made it unlisted as I found some of the other things from the area and now I’m working on combining the two.

My question of course is whether Christina Kleckner and other women particularly those with disabilities may have gotten into relationships with Castro and then as they came back around believing he was their friend or wanting to re-establish that relationship, he got rid of them or something. One woman is actually missing since 1995 right on the street where his mother’s house was – on Kinkle Ave.

And, before everyone starts looking cross-eyed at all their neighbors, they need to remember this – the man Ariel Castro was not even looked at by police despite him spending years upon years brutalizing his wife and acting as a threat to his neighbors – and police were called about much of it without them doing anything. That is significant.

I found this one last night – but she didn’t disappear from Akron but from a foster home in an area she didn’t know of West Cleveland – (but she is listed as a missing person from Akron, Ohio.)

18-year-old Akron woman with mental disabilities missing in Cleveland

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Police are asking for help to find a missing 18-year-old woman who has mental disabilities.

Marlena Manzie was placed in a foster home Oct. 31. Police said she was walking to a nearby store and didn’t return.

A missing-person report was filed at 5 p.m. Nov. 1.

Manzie, who has mood and attention-deficit disorders and a child’s IQ, is from the Akron area and has limited knowledge of Cleveland, police said.

Manzie told her new foster mother that she was going to buy cigarettes at 8:30 p.m. She was seen at West 96th Street and Madison Avenue, then didn’t return to the foster home in the 2100 block of West 96th.

She has no history of running away from home, according to the police report.

She was wearing a denim jacket, black pants, purple shirt and white tennis shoes. She is 5 feet 5 and 160 pounds.

Anyone with information is asked to call First District detectives at 216-623-5118 or 9-1-1.

And it isn’t said in this article but if Castro’s abuse of his wife that is known started after her first child was born – that could’ve been 1981, though these details from this article carry back to 1989 – certainly more than enough for the family and community, the police and his brothers to know what he was doing to women that was already horrific and wrong.

The problem is that in America, any crime against a woman is not considered a crime at all. Had Castro been treating his dog as he treated his wife, he would likely have been arrested and been in jail even to this day from any of those points in time when it was known he was brutally beating and sadistically abusing his wife. How could his mother have stood by and done nothing with her son treating any woman this way? It is no wonder that he took three women and held them captive, tortured them and treated them horrifically – none of the authorities around him thought there was anything wrong with the things he had been doing to women and children all along.

I still bet his daughter tried to kill her 11-month old child because of it being his from rape and incest – it is the most likely of all and that when she told her husband to be – he left her and sent her over the edge with his contempt and obvious disregard of her and the child. But there will never be justice for them either. Police in Cleveland continue to say that no other victims could be the result of Ariel Castro’s actions – even after finding the three women he has brutalized. Before it is over, the law enforcement there and the community will probably be blaming those three women for what happened to them. It is disgusting, but that is too common to think it won’t happen.

– cricketdiane

*(

Castro’s run-ins with the law date back to at least Sept. 30, 1989, when common-law wife Grimilda Figueroa called city police from their 98th Street home to report that Castro had assaulted her.

Figueroa, who had two small children at the time, told police that Castro’s brother had come by wanting to go out. When Figueroa asked where they were going, Castro became violent, she told police.

“Suspect slapped the victim several times in the face,” the police report said. “Victim tried to get away from the suspect. He then grabbed her and slammed her several times against the wall and several times against the washing machine.”

Figueroa ran to the family living upstairs and called police, the report said.

Figueroa, who was treated at the hospital for an injured shoulder, told police Castro had assaulted her on several other occasions but she had not filed complaints.

The outcome of the case, like most other cases involving Castro, was not available.

Before the Cleveland nightmare, hints of darkness

A car pulled up. The driver was the father of one of her best friends. She got in the car.

For the next nine years, authorities say, Knight, Berry and DeJesus together endured an excruciating ordeal as captives in a seemingly normal house on a seemingly normal street in a busy residential neighborhood less than 7 km away. Until their remarkable rescue last week, authorities say, they were physically, sexually and psychologically abused by their captor, Ariel Castro, a school bus driver who played salsa music in nightclubs and harbored a dark past that foreshadowed the crimes he’s now accused of committing.

At Castro’s home on Seymour Avenue, he chained the young women in his basement, according to a police report. Eventually, investigators say, he moved them to the second floor of his house, a two-story place with a small back yard, a saggy porch, peeling paint and faded white siding. Most of the time, they were trapped inside, and on the rare occasions they were allowed to venture into the yard, Castro forced them to wear wigs and sunglasses, the report says. He told them to keep their heads down.

Castro, now 52, raped all his captives, authorities say. Five times he impregnated Knight, she told police, but he never let her have a baby. He’d starve her. He’d punch her in the stomach over and over until she miscarried, the police report says.

Unfortunately for women and girls in America, if these girls had gotten away from Castro and then told who did it – no one would have believed them. And left to psychologists and psychiatrists and police they would have had to make their story to – none of them would have believed any of the things they were claiming happened to them could have happened at all.

And that is what is likely to happen to every single woman, girl, daughter, wife, mother, single mother, elderly woman and disabled woman in America – it is more likely than any of the wonderful happy life kinds of things that we would all see on tv commercials and sitcoms as life possibilities. It didn’t start being this way yesterday – it started being this way about thirty years ago during the 198-s and has been that way ever since. The horrific events happening to women are the American Dream that is truly the only things likely for any female to experience in America. There is something seriously wrong with our men to have allowed this to go on unabated for so long – and something extremely wrong with our police and other authorities that they could not find these women nor ever considered questioning Ariel Castro about them – and with nearly 800 police agencies in Ohio – that can’t be right.

– cricketdiane

**

I did find one thing that is taking up a lot of police time in Cleveland, Ohio – particularly in the last few years –

The city of Cleveland has dropped charges against a man ticketed after helping a wheelchair-bound homeless man.

John Davis was driving on West 117th near the I-90 interchange on May 17 when he stopped to hand $2 out his window to a homeless man, but the money fell to the ground. A Cleveland police officer pulled the Elyria man over, and gave him a $344 ticket for littering.

Davis went to court to fight his ticket on Thursday morning, and won.

“I saw him sitting in the wheelchair,” Davis told 19 Action News. “I don’t care what anyone says, he’s not going to be there if he didn’t need help, but I guess it’s not good to do it in the manner I did it. That won’t happen again, but I will help again.”

Davis says he will help by donating through charities.

He also says he holds no grudge against the officer who gave him the ticket or the Cleveland Police. He’s just glad the ordeal is over without being hit with the hefty fine.

Thursday afternoon, Cleveland Police took to Facebook to address what’s legal and illegal when giving homeless you hard earned cash.

“Cleveland Municipal Court, the City Prosecutor moved to nolle, or dismiss, the littering citation issued to John Davis for allegedly tossing money out of his car window to a homeless man. Now that the court proceedings are complete, we want to set the record straight.

1. In the City of Cleveland, it is illegal to ask for money from the side of the roadway and it is also illegal to GIVE money from your vehicle to someone soliciting funds.

2. When people ask for, or solicit, money from the roadway they place themselves and others in harm’s way. If you take a close look at this photo, the man pictured is very close to the edge of the curb. If he rolls his wheelchair less than a foot, he would topple right INTO the off-ramp of I-90. Traffic can, and does, become a major issue as each person stopping to hand this man money is, in fact, IMPEDING the FLOW of traffic. This causes traffic to back up (which, let’s face it, can make for some serious road rage) and increases the likelihood of accidents.

3. A number of individuals who are homeless suffer from mental health issues and/or substance abuse problems. Oftentimes, well-intended contributions made directly to individuals are spent on drugs or alcohol. Therefore, it is the recommendation of the Cleveland Division of Police that any charitable contributions be made to an accredited advocacy program, of which there are many. Funds collected by the advocacy groups are spent on healthcare, food and shelter for the homeless.

As always, the primary concern of the Cleveland Division of Police is the safety of the public we serve. Let’s all take this opportunity to learn from what happened and to make Cleveland a better place where we can truly help those in need and keep each other safe.”http://www.19actionnews.com/story/18664721/elyria-man-fights

**

And apparently Castro was driving the school but with special needs children – that is also after he was known to have abused his wife horrifically – but they hired him anyway.

I still don’t see how he afforded most of the things he was paying for – including music equipment, a Jeep Cherokee, truck and motorcycle, feeding himself and four others in the house, light bills and insurance and everything special he had to buy to keep these women and to brutalize these women. That would all have to be far more than his income from driving a bus could provide even getting a little money from playing music too. But maybe –

He couldn’t have started with these three women either – he took them already prepared for keeping them, got them into his house in a very close quarters neighborhood and took them in daylight without them getting out and running off – too refined for him to have started with them. And, he couldn’t have started at that age – more likely he started these behaviors in his twenties. Anyone who thinks it is sexual should think again – his crimes are about something else with sexual brutality no more than a tool of that abuse and sadistic control games. But in the photo shown from the Daily Mail – even in 2001, he had obvious signs that his hands were beating something or someone so viciously that the signs of it even show up in the photograph. Police can’t be that stupid to believe there are no other victims of this man. Why do they continue to protect him?

Press Releases

June 30, 2009

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
Office of Thrift Supervision

For Immediate Release
June 30, 2009

WASHINGTON — Delinquencies and foreclosures on first-lien mortgages continued to increase during the first quarter of this year, but loan modifications also increased and the trend continued toward more sustainable modifications with lower monthly payments, according to a report issued today by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).

The report, based on data from loan servicing companies that manage 64 percent of all first-lien U.S. mortgages, shows:

The number of loan modifications significantly increased. During the quarter, servicers implemented 185,156 new loan modifications, up 55 percent from the previous quarter and 172 percent from the first quarter of 2008.

The proportion of payment-reducing modifications also increased. More than half of the modifications in the first quarter of 2009 resulted in lower monthly principal and interest payments, as servicers focused on achieving more sustainable mortgage payments. Modifications that reduced monthly payments by 20 percent or more jumped 19 percent from the previous quarter, to 29 percent of all modifications. By contrast, actions that resulted in increased payments constituted only 19 percent of modifications, a drop of 25 percent from the previous quarter.

Modifications that reduce payments have lower delinquency rates over time. Although delinquencies on modified loans increased each month following modification, delinquency rates were considerably lower for mortgages in which monthly payments were reduced. Six months after modification, only 24 percent of the mortgages that had monthly payments reduced by 20 percent or more were 60 or more days past due, compared with 54 percent of mortgages with monthly payments left unchanged, and 50 percent with higher monthly payments.

Seriously delinquent mortgages increased. Seriously delinquent mortgages (60 or more days past due or involving delinquent bankrupt borrowers) increased as economic pressures continued to weigh on homeowners. Prime mortgages, which represented two-thirds of all mortgages in the portfolio, had the highest percentage increase in serious delinquencies, climbing by more than 20 percent from the prior quarter to 2.9 percent of all prime mortgages.

Foreclosures in process increased. Foreclosures in process also increased during the quarter to 844,389, or about 2.5 percent of all serviced loans, as moratoriums on foreclosures expired during the first quarter. This increase represented a 22 percent jump from the previous quarter and a 73 percent rise from the first quarter of 2008.

The OCC and OTS continue to refine the Mortgage Metrics report each quarter. In previous quarters, the agencies added data on the performance of modified loans, and information on sustainability and changes in payments that result from modifications.

This report adds information on the types of actions taken to modify loans. It shows that servicers most often change multiple terms when modifying mortgages to achieve sustainable modifications. Capitalization of delinquent interest, fees, and advances, combined with interest rate reductions and extended maturities, were the predominant combinations during the first quarter. Interest rate and payment freezes, principal reductions, and principal deferrals were less prevalent.

Data also showed a continuing emphasis on preventing avoidable foreclosures to keep families in homes and mitigate losses, as servicers continued to implement more home retention actions (loan modifications and payment plans) than home forfeiture actions (foreclosures, short sales, and deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure actions). Prime borrowers received about twice as many home retention actions as home forfeiture actions, while subprime borrowers received more than seven times as many.

“While I’m very concerned about the rise in delinquent mortgages and foreclosure actions, the shift in emphasis by servicers to more sustainable, payment-reducing modifications is a positive step that should show significant benefits in the coming months,” Comptroller of the Currency John C. Dugan said. “In addition, as the Administration’s Making Home Affordable program gains traction and helps offset the impact of this very difficult economic cycle, we should continue to see progress in future reports.”

“We continue to drill deeper into the mechanics of foreclosure prevention actions, thereby gaining more insight into what works,” said OTS Acting Director John E. Bowman. “This report provides a valuable roadmap for how financial institutions can best ensure that more Americans will stay in their homes.”

The report covers the performance of 34 million loans totaling more than $6 trillion in principal balances from the beginning of 2008 through the end of the first quarter of 2009.

The impact of the increase in modifications, particularly those with reduced monthly payments, will be seen only in future data. Likewise, data presented in this report do not reflect modifications made under the Administration’s Making Home Affordable program, which was announced in March and began to be implemented after the reporting period, and changes to the Hope for Homeowners program.
Attachments:

Foreclosures in process increased. Foreclosures in process also increased during the quarter to 844,389, or about 2.5 percent of all serviced loans, as moratoriums on foreclosures expired during the first quarter. This increase represented a 22 percent jump from the previous quarter and a 73 percent rise from the first quarter of 2008.

REQUEST A FORM

Pursuant to Part 302 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), entitled “Comments on UNICOR Business Operations,

” any interested person having any comment concerning the business operations of FPI may write to –

Board of Directors

Meetings

The next meeting of the FPI Board of Directors will be determined at a later date.

Contacting FPI’s Board of Directors in Writing

Pursuant to Part 302 of Title 28 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), entitled “Comments on UNICOR Business Operations,” any interested person having any comment concerning the business operations of FPI may write to the Chief Operating Officer of UNICOR, or to the Chairman of the Board of Directors of UNICOR, and bring such matters to the attention of either or both officials. Section (b) provides that such requests should be sent to UNICOR’s address, 320 First Street, Washington D.C. 20534, with the notation “Attn: Comment Procedures.”

Persons may write to individual Board members directly, at their respective business addresses, as provided below:

The Nation’s need to understand crime as it occurs at schools, colleges, and universities was officially placed into law by the US Congress with the passage of the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy
and Campus Crime Statistics Act6 (Clery Act).

Prompted by the 1986 rape and murder of a 19-year-old Lehigh College student in her dorm room, the Clery Act requires universities and colleges to report crime statistics, based on Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) definitions, to the Department of Education (ED) and to disclose crime statistics to nearly 16 million students attending any one of the Nation’s approximately 4,200 degreegranting, post-secondary institutions.7

Tremendous resources have been used to develop a myriad of federal and nonfederal studies that focus on identifying the characteristics surrounding violent crime, property crime, and/or crimes against society in schools.

The objective of such studies is to identify and measure the crime problem facing the Nation’s more than 90,000 schools and the nearly 50 million students in attendance.1

[ . . . ]

(and if you will notice what statistics they’ve used – my note)

Data from a variety of sources about crime in schools and colleges and characteristics of the people who commit these offenses provide key input in developing theories and operational applications that can help combat crime in our Nation’s schools, colleges, and universities.

Given the myriad of data available, the objective of this study is to particularly analyze data submitted to the FBI’s UCR Program by law enforcement agencies. It examines specific characteristics of offenders and arrestees who participated in criminal incidents at schools and colleges from 2000 through 2004.

Because the study dataset is not nationally representative, readers should be cautious in attempting to generalize the findings. (See the Methodology section for data caveats.)

Crime in the United States

Crime in the United States (CIUS) is an annual publication in which the FBI compiles volume and rate of crime offenses for the nation, the states, and individual agencies. This report also includes arrest, clearance, and law enforcement employee data.

Hate Crime Statistics

Each year’s edition of Hate Crime Statistics presents data regarding incidents, offenses, victims, and offenders in reported crimes that were motivated in whole or in part by a bias against the victim’s perceived race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability.

Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted

The FBI annually compiles data concerning the felonious and accidental line-of-duty deaths and assaults of law enforcement officers and presents these statistics in Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA). Tabular presentations include weapons used, use of body armor, and circumstances surrounding murders and assaults of officers.

Additional UCR Publications

The UCR Handbook outlines the classification and scoring guidelines that law enforcement agencies use to report crimes to the UCR Program. In addition, it contains offense and arrest reporting forms and an explanation of how to complete them. The Handbook also provides definitions of all UCR offenses.

This publication presents supplemental UCR statistics auxiliary to those published in Crime in the United States with regard to age-specific arrest rates and race-specific arrest rates for the years 1993-2001.

National Incident-Based Reporting System

In response to law enforcement’s need for more flexible, in-depth data, the Uniform Crime Reporting Program formulated the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). NIBRS presents comprehensive, detailed information about crime incidents to law enforcement, researchers, governmental planners, students of crime, and the general public. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division conducted the pilot demonstration of this program in 1987. Since then, implementation of NIBRS has been commensurate with the resources, abilities, and limitations of the contributing law enforcement agencies. Although participation grows steadily, data is still not pervasive enough to make broad generalizations about crime in the United States. However, several NIBRS studies and monographs are available on this site that demonstrate the great utility of NIBRS. Data collection and submission guidelines and NIBRS Frequently Asked Questions and NIBRS Incident Specific Questions are available as well to help law enforcement agencies with the implementation of and participation in NIBRS.

Many of these publications are in PDF (Portable Document Format). To view them you will need to have the latest version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in installed on your computer. The Reader can be downloaded at no cost from Adobe’s web site.

If you have trouble accessing any of the Uniform Crime Reports, please contact a member of the Communications Unit staff by telephone at 304-625-4995; by facsimile at 304-625-5394; or by Internet at cjis_comm@leo.gov. E-mail data requests cannot be processed unless requesters include their full name, a mailing address, and a contact telephone number.

Yes, so much more than you ever wanted to know. I understand that. But look at today’s date. Look at the date of the hate crimes report (pending) – it says 2008 – preliminary.

It is July of 2009 now.

These reports which aren’t even an accurate representation of last year’s numbers or the year before, are being used to decide everything from funding to whether there is a real problem to whether solutions which have been tried are working or making it worse.

And, maybe if our schools weren’t being built like prisons, run like prisons and subjecting huge percentages of our children to forced psychiatric medications and toxic disrespect, intolerance, hatred, cruelty, bullying, tortured exclusion rather than inclusion, shaming, disgust and lack of physical exercise – then they wouldn’t be breeding insanity there and criminal behaviors.

It’s just a thought –

– cricketdiane, 07-03-09

Happy Fourth of July – it looks like we’ve got a lot of work to do. There are a lot of things in America that are broken.

***

Get SMART-e

When most people think of a hospital, they picture images of a big, white building filled with bustling doctors and nurses. Clean. Efficient. Organized. Perhaps that once fit the description of the former Cardwell Hospital of Stella, Missouri. But by late 2005, the long since abandoned building was a dilapidated, ghost of a structure with a failing roof, peeling paint, and ruptured, asbestos-laden pipe insulation and floor tiles.

Time and neglect had turned a place of healing into a health hazard. By the next year, the building was gone, and that’s when the town got SMART-e.

February 26, 2009 – Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Oversight Committee on Ways and Means U.S. House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

June 19, 2008 – Joint hearing, Subcommittee on Oversight, Subcommittee on Social Security, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

April 16, 2008 – Hearing before the Subcommittee on Financial Services and Gerneral Government Committee on Appropriations, U.S. SenatePDF | HTML

April 10, 2008 – Hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on FinancePDF | HTML

February 12, 2008 – Hearing before the Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

May 9, 2007 – Hearing before the Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government Committee on Appropriations U.S. SenatePDF | HTML

April 19, 2007 – Hearing before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

April 12, 2007 – Hearing before the U.S. Senate, Committee on FinancePDF | HTML

March 20, 2007 – Hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on OversightPDF | HTML

February 16, 2007 – Hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on BudgetPDF | HTML

September 26, 2006 – Hearing before the U.S. Senate, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information and International SecurityPDF | HTML

July 26, 2006 – Hearing before the U.S. Senate, Committee on Finance, Subcommittee on Taxation and IRS OversightPDF | HTML

April 27, 2006 – Hearing before the U.S. Senate, Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury, the Judiciary, Housing and Urban Development, and Related AgenciesPDF | HTML

April 6, 2006 – Hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on OversightPDF | HTML

March 29, 2006 – Hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development, the Judiciary, District of Columbia, and Independent AgenciesPDF | HTML

March 12, 2003 – Hearing before the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on the Departments of Transportation and Treasury, and Independent Agencies, United States House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML | Attachment: PDF

May 14, 2002 – Joint Hearing before the Committees of the United States Senate and United States House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML | Short Version: PDF | HTML

May 2, 2002 – Joint Hearing before the Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations and Subcommittee for Technology and Procurement Policy Committee on Government Reform U.S. House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

April 15, 2002 – Hearing before the Subcommittee on Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations, Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

April 11, 2002 – Hearing Before the Committee on Finance, United States SenatePDF | HTML

May 8, 2001 – Joint hearing before Committees of the United States Senate and United States House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

April 3, 2001 – Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight, Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of RepresentativesPDF | HTML

March 21, 2001 – Testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General GovernmentPDF | HTML

May 3, 2000 – Testimony before Committees of the United States Senate and House of Representatives on Progress and Problems in Implementing the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998PDF | HTML

Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss illegal tax activities and their impact on the taxpaying public.I would also like to discuss some of my office’s efforts to detect these situations, and proposals for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to further reduce illegal tax activities.

[ . . . ]

Income tax schemes are destructive in many ways.While some of the individuals are willing participants motivated by greed, many involved are just unwitting victims who ultimately lose not only the anticipated tax benefit, but also the money they pay to the promoters of the scheme.Some of these taxpayers are elderly Americans who become victims of promoters.Individuals become participants in these schemes frequently through contact by unscrupulous promoters, falsely claiming that they have discovered legitimate, but little known, methods to avoid taxes.The “victims” subsequently learn that, once caught by the IRS, they must not only pay their entire tax liability, but they may also incur interest and penalty expenses, as well as the customary fee paid to the promoter.

It goes without saying that the proliferation of schemes aimed at providing individuals with an avenue to pay less than their fair share of taxes weighs heavily on the IRS’ ability to ensure voluntary compliance levels are at their maximum.

I believe taxpayers are more inclined to comply with the tax laws if they trust that the system is fair and structured adequately to identify and penalize those who do not play by the rules.However, increasing concerns that taxpayers doubt the effectiveness of the tax system have begun to surface.